A Day of Pleasure describes the author's experience of a world that was beautiful but fleeting. The Warsaw ghetto, where Singer spent much of his boyhood, and the Polish towns of Radzymin and Bilgoray, where he also lived as a child, no longer exist as Singer knew them. The book is thus both a memoir of and a memorial to a once vital, colorful, and exciting way of life that was irretrievably lost to Nazi depredations during World War II. For Jews born in America and elsewhere since the war, the book affords more than a glimpse into those bygone times that their parents or grandparents once knew intimately. A Day of Pleasure is not only about a series of incidents and adventures of a young boy growing up in what now must appear as strange and exotic surroundings; it is about growing up itself, about the hopes...